 Okay, as I said, today we are going to speak about biotech and I, so I'm Roberto Spurri from the University of Camerino, Italy. I will make a brief introduction about biotech, biotechnologies, and then I will introduce the next speakers, Professor Cesar Indigari from the University of Calabria and Testimonial from the University of Camerino, and last will be a speaker from the University of Siena, Professor Annalisa Santucci. We will have some time at the end of this presentation, this presentation for some question and answer in case there will be some questions, and we will be glad to answer to all your doubts and questions that you have. As I said, I'm going to very briefly present biotech, especially for young students, for those who are not familiar with biotechnologies, so I will give you some hints, some information about a little bit of history, a little bit of current tech, and a very short glimpse into the next future and what we expect in the next future. So I start simply by describing what has been defined as biotechnology, so the first definition is from an American engine, it was color, right, and at the beginning of last century he defined biotechnology as all lines of work by which products are produced from raw materials with the aid of little things, very simple definition, and I try to explain briefly what he meant. So the problem he was supposed to face was to have a good production of pigs, which may sound a little bit strange, but this was the problem that he was tackling. So what he did was something very simple, he was using sugar beads to enhance production, but what is relevant? What is relevant is the approach that he used, scientific and rigorous methods, so not just empirical, not just random, but was a scientific method based on rigorous consideration of the raw materials, so the amount of sugar beads needed to raise and grow these pigs, so this is as a function of amount of raw materials as well as a function of time, so a rigorous feeding schedule, and using these simple but rigorous methods, he managed to achieve what he wanted, so the improvement on pig production. I tell you this, this is based on what we still do, so we have a problem, a practical problem, and we have to solve it, applying a rigorous scientific method. For sure, Karl Leraki was not the first, and before him, we have to mention that eminent scientist, Louis Parcer, he did an incredible amount of work at that time and identified the mechanism of fermentation. Again, we are talking about living things, in this case, as you can see in the slide, his cells, and using simple instruments like microscope and basic microbiological technique, he managed to devise the mechanism of fermentation, that is something that we still use, and this technology are needed and are required to produce reproducible quality bakery products as well as brewery products, and we still use this kind of approach. I provide the third example, and now we're talking about human health, or in this case about disease, a very common disease that is diabetes, I'm sure most of you will not know what I'm talking about, and especially in some Asian countries, the prevalence of diabetes is very high, so what you can see here is sort of an average, about eight percent of population, but in some Asian countries can go up to 19 percent, so it's really a serious disease. To treat this disease, one way to treat is to provide the hormone that is insulin, so what you can see here on the picture is the first human insulin that has been produced by genetic engineers, so this is really a milestone in biotechnology, and to do this, researchers have used for the first time, for the first time, a drug factory, and this drug factory is what is shown on this picture, it is a bacterium that is commonly present in our gut, so it is an intestinal commensal, and E. coli, this is its name, can produce very large amount of this essential hormone, human insulin. I tell you this for tourism, first of all, as you can see here, this humulin is identified with the R, and it is also another R here, that stands for recombinant DNA technology, so this is produced by genetic engineering first, and the second point is that it is a great achievement, because before the production of this humulin R, diabetes was treated with pig insulin, so pig come back, and pig insulin is not exactly the same as human insulin, so it's quite different, and production of pig insulin from pig pancreas produced also some other contaminants and viruses, and so it was really a bad therapy at that time. Okay, so this is another example, as I said, and I want also to mention that those who devised this technology, and they are shown in this picture, Herbert Boyer and Stan Lee Cohen, working at Stanford University, were smart and bright enough to transfer the knowledge that they had devised at the California Institute of Technology, and then they managed to set up the very first biotech company that was dealing with genetic engineering, and its name was, and still is, Genentech, and now this small company has been acquired by the big company, Rush, so this is just an example of how then the technology developed in the laboratory can be then transferred to the market. I'm sure that those who are interested, especially young students who are interested in biotech, they're also curious about what is next, what could be next, so I will present to you and give you some information on what we expect from the next generation of biotech technologies. So what we need are essentially engineers. If you remember what I said in the first slide, Carl Lerecki was an engineer, and so we still need engineers, so people who can deal with genetic engineering, as I will show you in the next slide, and can manipulate genes and genomes, but also people who are able to modify proteins or protein engineers in order to have proteins which can recognize different substrates or mutant proteins with different features, and as well as metabolic pathways engineers, so scientists who know metabolic pathways and can modify part of these pathways, portion of these pathways in order to have, for instance, advanced therapies, but also for different applications like bioremediation, and so these different metabolic pathways can then be used for the contamination of polluted sites just to give you an example. So this is what is next. So you may ask yourself, do we still use all the instruments like the microscope used by Louis Passer? The answer, of course, is not, because we are now talking about molecules or macromolecules like DNA duplex shown in this slide, and the size of what we are looking at is now in the range of the nanometer, so something very, very small. So we need advanced methods, advanced technologies, advanced instruments, and not only for DNA, but also when we analyze complexes of nucleic acid and protein. So this slide is shown a ribosome that is considered a protein machine, so a machine that is used by cells to synthesize proteins, and here in gray is shown the nucleic acid for ribosomal RNA, and all these colored ribbons are ribosomal proteins. So as I said, we need sophisticated equipment, like in some cases X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance. So the first message for young people or for students, for those who are interested in biotechnology, is to have a solid knowledge of the fundamental aspects of biology, and also to acquire confidence with rigorous quantitative research methods. So this is an absolute prerequisite if you want to enter into this field. So now I want to give you a very brief overview of what we presume it is behind the corner, and what we think could be the area that will experience the most significant development in the near future, and so where, which are the opportunities also if those who are interested in establishing a small, medium enterprise or a micro enterprise in this field, and the possible products that could go into the market. So let's curious about what is behind the corner. So I give you just a few examples. These are biobased products, for instance, and I'm talking about cell material interactions. So this is a field where biotechnologies will be involved. As you can see here on this picture, this blue stuff is some kind of material, could be an hydrogel, for instance. So these are being investigated nowadays, the different types of hydrogels that can trap cells. So these are cells, these as well are cells, and so this can form cell materials that are suitable for the binding and for the entraping cells. And these are particularly suitable for, for instance, for medical implants. You see here in the pictures a knee or a hip that you can imagine with the extension of the lifespan of humans are being used more and more. So this was an example of biobased products. Another example is microbiome. Sometimes we use or you can hear different terms like microbiome and microbiota. They are slightly different with microbiota. We can hold the list of microorganisms that go from bacteria to cyanobacteria, fungi, or viruses that are symbiotes of human or animal. So also we as human, we don't live alone. We are not alone. And we, for instance, in our gut, there are something like 5000 species of microorganisms. So it's really a huge number. But it's not only the gut that is shown here in this slide, in this picture, but also on our skin or in our mouth, for instance. And what is known is shown here on this picture. So we know some of the general of this microorganism, some of their genes. But we don't know most of the function of these genes and what, which kind of microorganism we have for instance inside our gut. And simply, this is simply because we are not able to cultivate under laboratory conditions. So we know only a small portion of this microbial world. What we know, however, is the fact that differences in microbiome structure, so perturbation of the microbiome, are associated in many cases with disease. And so we, when we plan a therapy, we should always take into consideration these symbiosis. So we are not alone, we live together with a very complex microbiome. As I said before, we need or we expect to have in the next generation of biotechnologists, genome engineers. I want to give you an example of this, or the current technology. Maybe some of you know already or somebody never heard about it. So this technology is called the CRISP Cas9. So this is one of the names, at least, that we use to identify this technology. It's not an eukaryotic system, it is derived from a prokaryotic system from bacteria. And prokaryotes use this system to protect themselves from the attack and the invasion from viruses, or in this case from phages. So scientists that can use this technology, the technology of CRISP Cas9, to edit. And when I write here edit and I underline edit, I really mean the process that you normally use, for instance, when you use the Microsoft Office package, word or power point, you cut, copy and paste pieces. So in this case, are not words are not images are pieces of genes. And the wonderful thing of this technology is that you can do at any desired position. And not only this, you can do at any chromosome of your genome. So this for sure is a technology that will see major advances in an application in the future. But it's not future only is present technology. I can tell you that patients that are suffering from beta thalassemia as well as sickle cell disease are currently treated with this gene editing technology. So it's really, really a powerful technique. So and this is CRISP. This is just an example that is possible to construct using plague acid sensors and microchips. So it's possible to attach small pieces of DNA DNA fragments or oligonucleotides to a surface like a glass, for instance, and obtain this high density chip. They are called DNA chip or microchip. And to give you another example, I want to talk about computation. I'm sure that most of you know that computer work with the binary code. So it's a simple code 01. And you know that there is a conversion is possible to convert any number or any letter, capital letter or lowercase letter into bits. It's a simple bits, zero one bits. So this is to make a very complex story than synthesized in few words. So why I say this? Because pretty much the same happens with cells. And cells use a code that is not a binary code. So it's not zero one, but it is based on four letters that are therefore basis, nitrogenous basis, quans and add an in timing and cytosine that build up our DNA and our genes. What is the problem with this code made of four letters? The problem is that it's, we're talking about huge numbers. So a simple prokaryotic genome, like the one of E. coline that I mentioned before, is made by something like four or five millions base pair. And if we mention something like the human genome, we go to something like billions of base pair. So it's something that is not possible to handle by a scientist with standard methods. So we need really powerful tools, a powerful computational system to analyze this data. So that's why we talk about bioinformatics and protein and DNA sequence data. So that's why I put this picture that is a keyboard, a computer keyboard, and on top of it, the double elixir of DNA. So if we want to analyze and retrieve data and understand something more about our genes or the genes of living organism, could be plant, could be bacteria or could be mammals, we really need new tools, more sophisticated tools, and people who can analyze all this impressive amount of data. So this is a picture that now looks very old. It's the journals that published the first draft of the human genome. It's exactly now 20 years ago. It was 2001. And that was only a draft. So a portion of the human genome and this had been devised in at least from a consortium of researchers who were working on this on this project. They were working on at Rockville in Maryland in this laboratory. So you see the old-fashioned computers. So now they are no longer available. And I just want to point out the fact that they were working in a laboratory and on the roof of the laboratory, there was a blue double elixir just sticking to the roof to remind them that they were working with DNA. Okay, I will not go into the details of Green Deal policies, which are quite relevant issues nowadays, but I only tell you that there is plenty of room for biotechnologists to investigate possible solutions to pollution, to recycling of food waste, and to deal with the impact of cattle and other animals that we raise to produce food that they have a huge impact on our planet. Okay, so I will skip this about cultured meat, and I will simply go to the end of this introduction of biotechnologies and give you a take-home message, very simple. So I strongly suggest to all those young students who want to enter into this field to acquire a rigorous scientific method, as I said before, and to apply rigorous quantitative analysis if they want to achieve reproducible results. In addition to this, which is a prerequisite before you enter into biotechnologies, I strongly suggest you to be curious, because curiosity makes you smarter, and be curious at least as a cat, as it is shown here. And this with the address of all the people who will make talk today about biotech, I'll show you this last slide of my presentation. And that is it. Okay, I hope you could hear me. I see we went to a couple of maybe students more, one or two more, and after this initial introduction, I invite Professor Cesare Ndiveri from the University of Calabria to take the floor and start his presentation. Thank you, Roberto, and for your very interesting lecture on past, present, and future of biotechnology. I will start one moment just to share my presentation. Okay, I hope you can see the presentation. It's okay. I can hear you well. Fine. I will give you an idea of our new master degree in health biotechnology at the University of Calabria. The master degree is connected with the Department of Biology, Ecology and Arts Sciences, which is one of the most multidisciplinary of our university. This is an important feature, as you can imagine in biotechnology. I will just give you a flesh on how this master degree was conceived, starting from some of the research lines in our department and in our university. I will show this picture to give you an idea on how biotech based drug discovery research takes so much money that are, that are dedicated to this great research topic in the world. Just I would like to enlarge this part of the slide. You can see that every year, 250 billion dollars are dedicated to some of the drugs which have something to do with insulin. As you have heard before, insulin that was a drug that is the first drug that was conceived by biotech based drug discovery now has a market of 250 billion dollars. And you can see also that other drugs that now are used, largely used in human therapy, such as inhibitors or proton pump, takes about 100 billion US dollars. And a lot of other drugs which are connected with nervous system pathologies and so on. So the biotech based drug discovery industry is one of the most rich in the world. This makes a graduation and master degree course in biotechnology very appealing for students due to this, the possibility to easily go into the job. I will give you an idea on some research lines that starts from the tendency to reduce a lot animal experimentation in drug discovery. This is thanks to the possibility of using a very big chemical library which are made by two parts chemical libraries and in silico libraries which has the structures of the chemical product in the computer. And then the target protein which is normally a receptor that is important to target to stop some diseases or to give some effects in the human body. So thanks to the computational biology it is possible to fit one of this one or more of this huge amount of chemical compounds to a target protein structure by using only computation. That means no laboratory experimentation and very low cost with respect to the animal sacrifice. In our graduation course there are several teaching courses, molecular models of biological interest, applied human biochemistry or informatics for biotechnologies that contributes to give the basic knowledge on these processes to find the best chemical product that fits to a target protein structure. Then there is a second process which is the in vitro validation of this interaction. If a chemical adapts well to a protein structure and this is found by a computational biology then we will test whether indeed this chemical compound has the predicted effects and this is made by several biotechnology approaches which are studied in other teaching courses within this master degree which are applied human biochemistry, applied genetic biotechnology and molecular biotechnologies. The last part of this drug discovery line is finally the test on animals. So you can see that animals take part to the experimentation of a drug just at the end of this process. This decreases a lot the number of animals that are sacrificed for reaching for getting a potential drug for the market. Some teaching courses applications of biotechnology, neurotoxicology or methods of physiological investigations are some of the courses in which tests on the animals are shown for students and after all these lines there is the clinical trials that of course are out of the graduation the master degree in health biotechnology because these clinical trials need hospitals as you can imagine and you have listened especially due to the pandemics. This is one of the papers that have been published using methodologies such as that I have presented that have been made at our department and this deals with the repurposing of Nemesulid that is a potent inhibitor of one of the components of the receptor for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. This is just an example of working with this new methodology. The master degree does deals with research investigation is the biomedical and animal fields for applying in vivo and in vitro models in the field of diagnostic and the use of bioinformatics for molecular modeling and access to big databases with particular reference to genomics and proteomics and discovery of drug targets or compounds that may be used in the future as drugs. The employability of course is very large and we are convinced that graduate students in out biotechnology master degree could work in research laboratories in the biotechnology field and especially in the pharmaceutical diagnostic and biomedical and food sectors of course in the public and private sectors of the employment area and of course graduates can reach within the university also higher level of education such as PhD or specialization courses. In Italy after passing the Italian state exam graduates can also register in the professional senior biology list, Italian list and I hope in a very short time to have furnished to the students a reason why to follow this master new master degree in out biotechnology at the University of Calabria with the perspective of future jobs which we see that will be very highly productive in the next years. So thank you and I closed my presentation. Thank you Professor Vindiveri and this also your presentation reminds me for disciplinary you're clearly shown in the approach that you have presented and so you need microbiologists, you need biochemists, you need computational biologists, you need cell biologists and that it is really required to work all together if you want to come up with something new like in your presentation new drugs. So thank you again for the presentation and the approach that I think is very important for beginners and for potential new biotechnologies. Okay so after the second talk we can start to take the floor and so I introduce the testimonial for this webinar on biotech and her name so she's a PhD student here in America and she's working in my laboratory since the beginning of this year so she's a beginner and she will tell you something about her experience as a Vietnamese student here in Italy and I thus would like to invite Suy Dhuon Pham to take the floor and share her presentation and start her talk. Yeah thank you Roberto. There are some connection problems with connection okay even if well if you have problem with the camera at least try to share the presentation. Yeah so can you see it now? It is now at the end so you should go to the very first slide. Okay I can also see you. Yes and if you now go to the presentation mode I think we are ready so please take the floor and start go ahead with your presentation. Yeah thank you good afternoon everyone I am Suy Dhuon Pham a PhD student in life and health science and at the University of Camerino Unicom. I'm very happy to participate in this webinar and share with you my experience working in biotech field as a foreign student in Italy. So this picture of Hanoi city the capital of Vietnam where I come from is the center of economics, politics, diplomacy and culture as well. In 2016 I graduated from the University of Science the member of Vietnam National University Hanoi one of the most prestigious university in Vietnam. There I follow the biology course major in cell biology and after graduate I wanted to continue my education overseas. So through the word of mouth from the alumni at Unicom I applied for the biological science program at the school of bioscience and veterinary medicines. For undergraduate students they can apply for the bioscience and biotechnology course. The university also offer the degrees in informatics, medicines, laws and architectures for both undergraduate and postgraduate students and now I'm attending the School of Advanced Study. The International School of Advanced Study at Unicom plans organize and coordinate the course in order to achieve the title of PhD. There's a variety of fields that you can find here from architecture chemistry, social science, computer science, physics and health science. The one I'm following now is the molecular biology and cellular biotechnology program. So what do we do in our lab? Our lab we focus on the research about biomolecules the substance that produced by cells and living organisms for example proteins nucleic acids. Now I will show some articles that represents our works from the last few years until now. This published in 2005 about a novel peptide antibiotic. This article in 2014 about the interaction between protein and DNA. Another article about the target of antibiotic in 2015. The most recent one and the one I'm involving now is the research about microorganisms that able to produce antimicrobial molecules. So why do we focus so much on the antibiotics? The antibiotic resistance is not a new issue but is it happening for decades. It's now a threat to our health system. As you can see here this is the figure described the percentage of antibiotic consumptions without doctor's prescription in Vietnam. In both the rural areas and the urban areas it accounted for nearly 90% which are very high level. The overuse or misuse of antibiotics is responsible for the spread of antibiotic resistance and now we are facing a global health crisis due to shortening of effective drugs. At this part I would like to shift to Vietnamese for a while. Hope you don't mind. This is the 4th time in Vietnam that I have visited Thailand about 40% of antibiotics. The misuse of antibiotics is not as effective as the use of a doctor's prescription or more than the use of a doctor's prescription is also responsible for the use of antibiotics to reduce the effect of antibiotics in a positive way. So the use of antibiotics in the region is getting more and more limited due to the choice of antibiotics. It's getting less and less because of the fact that the use of a doctor's prescription is very important and this is what we are focusing on. So starting from the study of antibiotics in Camerino, we are moving on to other types of antibiotics such as E. coli, Clapsila pneumoniae, and Staphylococcus aureus which is also called the yellow cell. In order to find out the types of antibiotics that have the ability to produce anti-inflammatory drugs to reduce the effect of antibiotics, we are going to do a research on the types of antibiotics. So how do we apply the biotech approach into this study? Start from the cultural collection of microorganisms available at UNICAM we're screening those microorganisms against several different pathogens for example E. coli, Clapsila pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus, and through several purification steps we get the purified active metabolized and we study about their characterizations. And of course we're going to need more steps for the laboratory trials and clinical trials to before really get the effective drugs. So where do we perform all of the research activity? Let's follow my colleagues. Another Vietnamese student in our lab, his name is Nam Anh Ngô. This is our main building at the biology department of UNICAM. Here we have some other laboratories and the classrooms for students. This is the lab bench where I perform my research activity both during my master and now for my PhD works. They are my colleagues doing their experiments as we deal with microorganisms, the one that we are unable to see with our eyes. So microscope is essential and there are also some basic tools that you can find in every biotechnology lab. For example the pipest, the plate, the glass vial and the big equipment that you can see here is for the isolation and characterization of biomolecules. Here my colleague is performing the column chromatography. So that is my daily works and then how about my daily life? What is the life being living apart from your family for nearly 9,000 kilometers? Of course you will face some problems. In my case firstly is the language barrier. As I am, I barely can speak Italian and for most Italian they don't speak English. So I was struggling while doing my paper document. For example registering a resident permit, opening bank account, buying the health insurance. But I did overcome it with the Italian cost that provided by my university and you can also access to some other online costs in some educational platform online. Secondly is the cultural shock. It's not only happening for me, for you, for Vietnamese students here but for all other foreign students. You may be in homesick, jet lag due to different time zones. You may feel lonely, depressed but in my case by joining the community of Vietnamese students in Italy and then I met the people who shared the same feeling with me. We comfort and cheer each other up and I also received a lot of assistance from my classmates, my colleagues and my supervisor. Now just leave all the bad things behind. What are the good things that you may get from studying in Italy? You have a good access to the university in all of Europe through the annual exchange program Erasmus or other programs that may available in your university. Secondly, traveling, everyone loves traveling. Italians are well known for their tourism with one of the most ancient landmarks, Colosseum in Rome. Actually I've never had the chance to enter it but yeah I really looking forward and you have the opportunity to explore the western culture. This picture is about a medieval festival that taken place in Camerino every year. Its name is Corsa alla Spada and you will have a very great view of the nature, the beauty of nature and these are the pictures of Camerino during the summer and winter time. Lastly I would like to share some good memories of mine with my colleagues during my master year with my Italian colleagues and the Chinese colleagues. The picture here is during my graduation day, one of the important great days like I achieved a milestone in my life with my great supervisors. So yeah, thank you so much. Thank you for your listening. Yeah okay thank you B. I call you B because we are used to call you B even if I should call you correctly as a tool to walk from. Thank you for the presentation and I'm sure that no Italian student or Italian professor could explain what is the feeling of Vietnamese students so that's why I think for a testimonial it's very important to have a person who experienced the University in Vietnam and University in Italy and now a PhD in Italy. So thank you again B. I'm very appreciative that you have given me this opportunity. You're welcome B. And now it's time to move to the last speaker and she's Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Siena, Professor Annalisa Santucci and she is now sharing her presentation and so I invite Professor Santucci to take the floor and start her presentation. Thank you Roberto and good afternoon everybody following us and from Vietnam and thanks for giving me the opportunity of telling you something about the very true interaction between the University of Siena and the industrial biopharmaceutical sector. Pharmaceutical companies are an important sector of the Italian industrial system to constitute a relevant national asset in terms of production and export of medicinal products. Tuscany region is more or less in the center of Italy as you can see in this map and the city Siena is located in the heart of Tuscany and Tuscany and Siena are both crucial districts of this important sector. In fact Italy ranks first in Europe in the European Union in Europe and among the first in the world in this sector. Italian pharmac companies play a role of leadership in Europe for the production and export with the worldwide excellence for biotech, vaccines, blood, derivatives or from drugs and advanced therapies. Such a European primacy is respected in the investment made in Italy on biotech pharma innovation. Italy is the world leading country of all the number of innovative contracts between companies and national health systems accounting for 36% of the world's total. The life sciences cluster in Tuscany is quite strong. Many leading companies in the pharmaceutical world are strongly rooted in the Tuscany region and play a key role in the local ecosystem while also focusing on global markets. These are the defining characteristics of the companies that have formally joined the so-called Tuscany Pharma Valley, the first network of Italian multinationals in the pharmaceutical industry and this valley is centered on Siena area whose pharma pool is number one in the world for research and development of vaccines and HEMO derivatives. Siena University has a pilot role in the company's observatory of the foundation of the conference of the Italian university directors that has advisory tasks towards the many different ministries. A further development of the Tuscany Pharma Valley may be expected by the activation in Livorno which is located on the coast of Tuscany of a fully automated and digitized regional logistic and distribution hub for finished products and packaging materials in the pharmaceutical and biomedical industry. So Siena is an historical public private territorial integrated ecosystem for research and education. This is due to strong and long lasting links and collaborations between the University of Siena, the University Hospital and private organizations ranging from large international industries to small medium enterprises operative in Siena territory in addition to several or ongoing international collaborations and the strong support of Tuscany region. No-profit organizations such as the Scanner Life Sciences Foundation also access facilitators and system aggregators. So Siena may be seen as a public private territorial integrated ecosystems for research and education center on our university, centered on academia. If Siena University is central to such a biotech pharma ecosystem then the department of biotechnology chemistry and pharmacy that I have the honor to head is central to Siena University activity. Our department is the paradigmatic of the interactions with our territory because it was designed on a cross cutting project that connects expertise in the fields of molecular and biotechnological sciences through a highly multidisciplinary approach. Our department is a reference point for key sectors and smart specializations for the development of Tuscany territory by a medical pharmaceutical focused on the design, development, marketing and research on therapeutics, diagnostics, vaccines and biomaterials but also renewable energy and sustainability, agri-food and bio-academy. We adopt the concept of the department as an incubator of open innovation. Our department has won a national selection launched by the Italian ministry for university and research which has identified a number of departments of excellence in Italy and we have been designated as a department of excellence based on a competitive selection process and we have received funds for a five years project devoted to promoting excellence through investments in human capital, infrastructure and higher education. The scientific project has been based on the evolution of our already existing bi-national lab at the University of Siena in our department and at the Bowling-Grith-State University of Ohio and the laboratory for computational photochemistry and photo biology. We have developed an innovative computational technology to produce novel photoactive able molecules that can be applied in the pharmaceutical fields and novel solar convection system fields as well in the field of synthetic biology. In the department of excellence projects, thanks to the acquire funds, the investment plan for capital goods has become the development of an open access technology platform shared with the Siena Life Sciences Foundation to create a potent pharma biotech, public, private, multi-competence hub covering services from drug design to the end of the preclinical phase which is quite unique in the Italian scenario and probably also at the European level. Siena Life Sciences companies are mainly biotech pharma companies with a non-exclusive focus on vaccines. Vaccines have been Siena world excellence since the beginning of the last century and the evolution of these in the COVID area is an example of academia industrial collaboration with a project that is coordinated by Professor Rino Rappoli from our department. Professor Rappoli has been the world leader for more than 30 years and is now pioneering the field of therapeutic human monoclonal antibodies. It has been the research on inventing the reverse vaccinology technology and found the vaccines against meningitis. Thanks to the collaboration with Craig Venter who was the boss of the cellular genomics that was previously presented at the beginning of the human genome project by Professor Spuder. Currently Professor Rappoli is working in Siena on MAB Core 19. There is a human monoclonal antibody against SARS-CoV-2 and the first aim of this project is to obtain a therapy and also to use it as a passive prophylaxis. This antibody is now at the end of its clinical trial and will be an invaluable remedy to protect the most vulnerable sections of the populations where mortality from COVID-19 is highest. Professor Rappoli is a member of both the teaching boards of the two educational programs I'm going to show you. The first program I would like to show you is the PhD school in biochemistry and molecular biology that is a task and regional PhD school co-funded competitively by the task in a region on European funds and that includes professors and students from Siena, Pisa and Florence universities and is coordinated by our department in Siena. The teaching staff of our PhD school comprehends academic members from Siena, Florence and Pisa universities being Siena coordinated and also professor from foreign universities like Liverpool, the King's College in London, the University of Cambridge, the Queen Mary but also outside Europe, the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Melbourne and so on. We also include highly qualified researchers from research center and researchers from biotech companies located in the Tuscany Farmer Valley. The PhD school in biochemistry and molecular biology is a three-year industrial executive PhD school. It is innovative being intersectoral, interdisciplinary and international and is certified for industry 4.0 and big data analysis. It has been a knowledge as a top-level PhD school in Italy. The second degree I would like to show you is second master, second cycle master's degree in sustainable industrial pharmaceutical biotechnology and this is linked to the Green Deal that was mentioned before by professor Spurio. In fact, this two-year program is a unique novel educational program first in Europe conjugating biochemical with management and sustainable development knowledge. It responds for a paradigmatic change that is necessary in industrial pharmacological education where crucial elements must be included on social environmental economic sustainability as well as on the deep digital transformation of health and industry 4.0. We have designed this international course considering the new global vision on sustainable health that has been dramatically highlighted by the COVID pandemic. Green technologies and alternative renewable resources by economy but also connecting health care and industry 4.0, precision medicine and digital and next generation therapeutics as well as vaccines of the 21st century. The two-year program includes the fields of pharmaceutical products, biobased products, sustainable development and life cycle thinking, bioinformatics and big data and international management and international regulatory affairs. We have the ambition to educate a novel polyvalent multi-competent cross-cutting professionals playing responsibility roles for the biotech pharma sector and possessing also the 10 top skills indicated by the world economic forum. Here you can see some further details about the study plan and of course we are totally available for further information if you are interested and we can of course provide further details. To effectively conjugate know and know how we have co-designed the course with humanistic and economic university departments but mainly with our industrial partners who hire the same time as also our main stakeholders. So we included important contributions from the extra academic and industrial world on issues otherwise uncovered in any other university program and adopted a novel integrated and flexible educational model with innovative and immersive teaching methods exploiting industrial labs and developing the ability of team working versus conventionally individual university programs. The program follows the guidelines indicated by the seven theme goals of the sustainable development suggested by they promoted by the United Nations Organization with a special project that is particularly devoted and dedicated to the fifth aim which is gender equality. The second cycle master degree on sustainable industrial pharmaceutical biotechnology responds to the agreement that Siena University assigned in 2012 about the commitment on sustainable practices of higher education institutions on the occasion of the United Nations conferences on sustainable development. We will be more than happy if someone would be interested to attend our courses or sign cooperation agreements with us and meanwhile thank you for your attention. Okay thanks a lot professor Santucci it was very interesting and comprehensive overview so not only possibilities at the university but real tight connections with the market and the new current and new economics behind the corner so that's really interesting and I think also those who will watch this video or are attending this webinar today will be very very interested in this SIFA but that is really an up-to-date system of providing the most up-to-date teaching courses so thanks again. Okay so yeah we are if I look at the number of participants I can see we are just about seven so not so many indeed but if there are questions we are happy to answer to your questions and so if somebody wants to open the microphone and eventually also the camera so we can see who they are they can ask a question to all four speakers please or at least if you are shy and you don't want to ask a question you can write in the chat so that is an alternative if there are any questions actually we don't have so many people in the audience I have to say but maybe this one hour or a little bit more than one hour presentation will be of interest for students who will watch this on the website or on the YouTube channel so we do hope this will attract some of potential students at least from Vietnam to Italy so this is what we can say and if there are no questions I thank all the speakers so Professor Indiveri the testimonial to Edouard Farm as well as Professor Santucci and I ask you if you have anything else to add to this presentation. Yes it has been a really a pleasure to have the opportunity of showing some of the things we can do to the Vietnam students and audience and I hope that the recording of this meeting will also be viewed by additional people and any Vietnamese person or student will be welcome in our country and our cities in Camarino and Siena and in Calabra and our wonderful country. Yeah for sure they're more than welcome. Any other comments or? I also would like to thank you Roberto for this nice event and I hope that the YouTube version will have more success among students so we'll get some other students following our master's courses. Thank you very much. Of course we will check in the next days if we will have some views. I think the the main reason is because now it night in Vietnam so not many people can watch it. Yes that's why I thought that it was nine Italian Italian hour this morning but it wasn't I was surprised because it's an inaccessible time somehow. But this was not up to us so we were fixed to this timing and for sure it's not the best time to present our work and our department. Anyway now maybe young people are more used to watch a video at any time rather than live video. Yeah and that means B can be a vehicle of this video. That's why I hired V not because it's been a great idea I think. So she would be a trade union between Vietnam and Italy. Oh yeah my pleasure yeah. Okay so thank you very much. I don't see anything in the chat and nobody opening the microphone and so for this reason I thank again all the participants and in particular the speakers and I will right now stop the registration and maybe see you at the next Italy or even better maybe to a meeting in the next future if we are allowed to have scientific meeting in the next future. Okay bye to all of you. Bye thank you very much. Bye.